from the fun-with-fonts dept

Some people get really worked up about fonts. Here, for example, is a thread on Reddit, spotted by Leigh Beadon, about the appearance of the serif font Cambria on the show "Better Call Saul". The problem is that the show is set in the years 2002 and 2003, while Cambria was designed in 2004. The (mock?) outrage about this slip-up is all good fun, but obviously nothing too serious. Unlike in Pakistan, where another apparent font faux pas is leading to calls for the country's prime minister to resign.

Documents claiming that Mariam Nawaz Sharif was only a trustee of the companies that bought the London flats, are dated February 2006, and appear to be typed in Microsoft Calibri.

But the font was only made commercially available in 2007, leading to suspicions that the documents are forged.

Social media users have derided Sharif for this apparent misstep, coining the hashtag #fontgate.

Such is the interest in #fontgate and the humble sans serif Calibri font, that visits to the relevant Wikipedia page have ballooned from 500 visits per day to 150,000 in just two days. As a result of the intense interest and some dubious editing attempts, Wikipedia has been forced to act:

After users seemingly tried to change the article's content to say the font was available from 2004, Wikipedia suspended editing on its Calibri page "until July 18 2017, or until editing disputes have been resolved".

Although you might think this is pretty much at the level of the Reddit discussion of Cambria, rival politicians in Pakistan see it as much more serious -- and an opportunity they can exploit:

Opposition parties have urged prime minister Nawaz Sharif to step down after the investigation found a "significant disparity" between his family's declared wealth and known sources of income.

from the not-cool dept

You recall, of course, the Panama Papers? The massive leak of documents about offshore shell companies last year, that a large coalition of reporters worked on for many months before releasing a bunch of stories at the same time. The documents were leaked from a law firm, and highlighted more than a few cases of what appeared to be questionable activity by the rich and powerful in moving money around in offshore accounts. Apparently the subject of one such story, Malta's Prime Minister Joseph Muscat, wasn't happy that he and some of his colleagues were mentioned in some of the reporting on this, and filed a defamation case against Matthew Caruana Galizia, the reporter who wrote up some stories, using the Panama Papers, arguing that Muscat and his chief of staff were involved in a scheme to get kickbacks on the sale of Maltese passports.

Caruana Galizia, who is a journalist at the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), and who coordinated the mass reporting effort on the Panama Papers (and who won a Pulitzer Prize as part of that), had posted those stories to his Facebook page. In addition to facing this defamation lawsuit, Caruana Galizia has also noted that Facebook has deleted some of his posts and locked him out of his account temporarily. It would appear that someone has complained to Facebook about those posts, claiming they were terms of service violations. Once again, this should be a reminder of the problem of relying on someone else's platform for posting your stories, as they get to make up the rules for what's allowed.

But there are two larger issues here: First, this appears to be a classic SLAPP-style lawsuit, in which reporters are being sued as an attempt to chill free speech on reporting that the subject doesn't like. I'm no expert in Maltese defamation law, but it does appear that there has been a lot of concern about abuse of Maltese defamation law to intimidate reporters and chill speech (amusingly, that article focuses on Daphne Caruana Galizia who has been sued a few times for defamation, and who appears to be Matthew's very proud mother). There have also been attempts to update defamation law in Malta, but there appears to be nothing akin to a an anti-SLAPP provision. Indeed, it's not even clear if there's a "truth" defense.

The interview with Daphne Caruana Galizia is quite detailed in how officials in Malta use defamation laws to chill the free speech of journalists:

The fees and court expenses for filing a civil suit for libel are low and therefore not a bar to frivolous cases. There is no penalty to be paid by those who file cases unnecessarily, even if they eventually lose the case. Meanwhile, the journalist who has been sued has to pay a lawyer to defend him/her, pay fees to file a formal response to the suit, and go to many court hearings over the course of several years. Even if the journalist is cleared of libel, he or she has still paid a heavy price in terms of stress, time wasted and money spent.

Criminal defamation cases are even worse. In this case, there is really no bar. The politician or other public person who feels himself to have been libelled will file a formal request for the police to prosecute the journalist, and the police are obliged to comply as they cannot ignore a formal request. The complainant pays nothing, as this is a police prosecution and not a civil suit. Meanwhile, the journalist must pay lawyers to defend him/herself and be present at every single court hearing as required under Maltese law. The stress is great. Though the government has pledged itself to repeal the criminal defamation law, it has not.

And now her son gets to experience that terrible process as well.

The other issue is Facebook's decision to take down the posts and lock Matthew out of his account. That's... bad. Yes, it's a private platform and has the right to make these kinds of decisions, but if Facebook wants to position itself as a platform for free speech and communication around the globe, it needs to stand up for the rights of the people using the platform, especially when they're doing investigative reporting, backed up by evidence, and speaking truth to power. Unfortunately, in this instance, it failed to do that, and is, instead, punishing the journalist. That's a shame.

from the in-the-name-of-the-people dept

As further evidence of how things are changing in China when it comes to attitudes to piracy, here's a news item from Caixin about the leak of the hottest TV series there at the moment:

A glossy Chinese television drama, inspired by the country's ongoing anti-graft campaign, has become the latest victim of rampant piracy, fueled by slack laws, weak enforcement and the absence of punitive fines.

A story about China's public prosecutors who dredge up a series of scandals as they investigate shady land deals, organized crime and [state-owned enterprise] reforms, In the Name of the People became an instant hit when it debuted on March 28 and has become one of the most-watched TV programs in Chinese history.

What makes an otherwise humdrum story about popular TV episodes turning up on video-sharing sites rather unusual is who is doing the complaining:

China's state prosecutors' office, which bankrolled the $12 million production, and other producers said they had reported the copyright infringement to police, and urged platforms including cloud services, e-commerce shops and video hosting sites to remove all unauthorized versions, in a joint statement last Thursday.

China's state prosecutors are not normally in the business of bankrolling TV productions. Presumably, they took that unusual step on this occasion because it was important to increase public support for Xi Jinping's long-running fight against corruption's "tigers" and "flies" using a medium that would reach a much wider audience than dull government speeches or press articles exhorting them to do the same.

One of the best ways to ensure the widest possible audience for that message would be to allow the TV series to appear on sites for people to download freely. So asking the companies running them to remove copies in order to "protect" the official broadcasts seems perverse. If anything, it shows that respect for copyright in China has now gone so far as to be harmful to more serious matters like tackling the country's corruption.

from the yay? dept

It's been well-established at this point that red light cameras, those devices that issue tickets and blinding lights to drivers not stopping on red, have always been less about safety and more about the revenue produced by the tickets. That really should be enough a story of corruption for anyone to cast a wary eye at cities implementing these cameras, but you really have to admire the brazen committment to corruption the city of Chicago displayed when initially contracting with the company Redflex for its camera system. The CEO for Redflex was brought up on federal charges for bribing city officials, including offering some condos and cars, because why mess around? Yet, even once we move past the corrupt manner the cameras were put in place, Chicago saw tons of its tickets tossed by a judge who noted that the city wasn't even following its own rules for due process on those tickets. Furthermore, the cameras were set to have a "grace period," the buffer time for which a driver could run a red light and still not be ticketed, of .1 seconds, even as other major cities' grace periods were three times that, and it was laughably clear how this system was designed entirely to bring in city revenue.

Under the new policy, which was announced Monday, the grace period for Chicago’s red lights will move from 0.1 seconds to 0.3 seconds. This will bring the Windy City in line with other Americans metropolises, including New York City and Philadelphia. In a statement, the city agency said that this increase would “maintain the safety benefits of the program while ensuring the program’s fairness.”

Except it really doesn't. This is the same system, no longer operated by Redflex due to the company's corrupt practices, but still born of that same corruption and forever tainted by it. Unaddressed thus far are the city's failings in due process, nevermind any valid analysis showing a safety benefit to any of this. Instead, the city has basically agreed to collect slightly less revenue in its traffic camera revenue program. This, by the way, is the city with the largest red light camera program in the nation. So... yay?

from the maybe,-just-maybe,-they-are-not dept

If you've been reading Techdirt for any time you'll know that copyright collecting societies have a pretty poor record when it comes to supporting the artists they are supposed to serve. Sometimes, that is just a question of incompetence, but often it veers over into something worse, as happened in Spain, Peru and India. TorrentFreak has some interesting news about an audit of the Greek collection society (AEPI). Initially, AEPI was reluctant to hand over the relevant documents to allow the audit to take place, but here's what has just emerged:

The final report, obtained by Greek publication TVXS, reveals a capital deficit of around 20 million euros, which according to the publication means AEPI cannot meet its obligations.

Despite that notable shortfall, key members of AEPI's management team have been getting paid rather handsomely:

AEPI's CEO alone received an annual salary of 625,565 euros in 2011, more than 52,000 euros per month. This figure has prompted outrage in local media.

Strangely, though, the actual artists that AEPI is meant to represent aren't doing quite so well:

According to the audit, AEPI’s IT system tasked with handling royalty payments was incapable of producing a report to compare royalties collected with royalties being paid out. But artists were certainly being short-changed on a grand scale.

"By Dec. 31st 2014, the undistributed royalties to members and rightsholders amounted to 42.5 million euros, and have still not been awarded to members," the Greek newspaper EfSyn notes.

A further post on the TorrentFreak site, this time concerning the former head of anti-piracy at the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), shows that there are problems with money in other parts of the copyright industry:

"BPI can confirm that a former employee, David Wood, was dismissed for gross misconduct in December 2015," a BPI spokesperson told TF.

"BPI has referred the matter to the Metropolitan Police who are investigating. As investigations are ongoing, it would not be appropriate to comment in any more detail at this stage.”

TorrentFreak sources indicate that very large sums of money are involved in the dispute, running well into six figures. Precise details have proven impossible to verify (the BPI declined to comment) but we understand the numbers involved are "significant".

Given that this kind of thing has been happening all around the world for years, you really have to wonder why these organizations are still allowed to put themselves forward as the legitimate representatives of the artists they serve so poorly.

from the cigar-boxes-and-trump-condoms dept

As the world continues to get used to an America with a President Donald Trump at its head, the binary nature of the current political climate has reared its own head in unfortunate ways. One example of this is the stunning speed with which many of those previously ignorant of the emoluments clause of the Constitution, as the Title of Nobility Clause is commonly called, have feigned familiarity with it. As one of my colleagues here termed it, the "emoluments hunting" going on is transparently political in nature, rather than representing a serious effort at protecting the public interest from the shadow of undue influence and sanctioned bribery over our highest political office.

Both sides of the American aisle are badly misusing this important constitutional text. Those whose skin might crawl at the mere words "President Trump" seem to find emoluments violations everywhere, even in the most trivial of cases. Trump himself, of course, hasn't helped in the matter, even when he easily could, as he has shirked the norms of disentangling the presidency from the previous life of he who holds that office. Trump, you will recall, has distanced himself from the decision-making aspects of the family business, but not the profits of it. It's an important distinction, which we'll get into in a moment.

But first, for the sake of context, let's start with the text of the emolument clause, as well as the framers' reasons for its inclusion in the highest law of our land. The text itself is blessedly short and seemingly simple.

No title of nobility shall be granted by the United States: and no person holding any office of profit or trust under them, shall, without the consent of the Congress, accept of any present, emolument, office, or title, of any kind whatever, from any king, prince, or foreign state.

The purpose for the clause was stated explicitly by Alexander Hamilton in the Federalist Papers.

"One of the weak sides of republics, among their numerous advantages, is that they afford too easy an inlet to foreign corruption."

That's pretty straight forward. To prevent the corruption of those in office, those who hold office are restrained from accepting titles, gifts and remuneration from foreign states or foreign leaders. Now, Trump and his allies have claimed repeatedly that the clause does not apply to the President. To do this requires a tortured reading of the clause itself, the blatant ignoring of its intention, as well as a peculiar emphasizing of certain historical events. For example, an oft-cited "proof" of the claim is that Hamilton himself responded to a request by Congress for a list of all persons holding office in the United States, as well as their salaries, with a list consisting only of those officers appointed, while omitting anyone who held elected office. When you have to reach that far back to such a simultaneously tangential and trivial historical instance to argue that a President should be allowed gifts from foreign governments, you don't have much of an argument at all.

And that debate has taken on a certain amount of primacy at present, because for all of the "emoluments hunting" currently going on, there are some very real instances where the raising of the clause is perfectly valid. One of those intersects nicely with a subject we discuss here regularly: trademarks. Chinese trademarks, specifically, now that President Trump, the businessman, has managed to win trademark rights in China after a long slog of a fight that only turned in his favor when he became Donald Trump, the President.

In the context of the entire point of the emoluments clause, it cannot be stressed enough just how long this fight has been going on.

In 2006, Trump applied for a trademark for “Trump” in connection with a company providing construction services in China. China’s Trademark Office rejected the application, on the grounds that someone else (Dong Wei) had filed a similar application about two weeks earlier, and had priority under China’s first-come-first-served trademark rule.*

* There are, apparently, more than 200 other “Trump” marks on the Chinese trademark register — for everything from Trump toilets to Trump pacemakers, Trump condoms and even a “Trump International Hotel” — that have been claimed by persons other than Trump (or any of the Trump Organizations). This, as all good trademark nerds will recognize, is a concrete illustration of a common problem in “first-to-file” jurisdictions, where it can be relatively easy to “reserve” a mark by filing an application, without evidence that you are actually using the mark in question.

Since that initial rejection in 2006, the Trump business has appealed the decision all the way up the Chinese legal ladder, and lost at every turn. The last loss his business suffered on the matter came in May of 2015, shortly before Trump declared his candidacy for President. The rulings, again, only went in one direction against Trump the businessman, and that was a losing direction.

Suddenly, in April of last year, Trump suddenly went back to the Trademark Review and Adjudication Board, which had ruled against his appeal of the original rejection of his trademark application, and asked it to simply review its previous decision. Strangely, the Review Board suddenly reversed course, invalidating Dong's trademark. Trump's trademark was not codified until November 13th, in the immediate aftermath of his winning the Presidency. Immediately after that, the Trump organization applied for nearly fifty other trademarks in China, all of which are pending.

In the context of this complete reversal, the timing of which coincides with Donald Trump becoming President of the United States, does this register as a violation of the emoluments clause? If we can finally resolve this question about whether the clause applies to the President in a way that preserves both the framers' intentions as well as the realm of common sense, it sure seems to be.

It’s not bribery, exactly, that we’re trying to prevent in this clause. We don’t need a special constitutional provision prohibiting office-holders from taking bribes, because taking bribes is already illegal under the common law, and it is also one of the “high crimes and misdemeanors” for which office-holders can be impeached. But it’s a close cousin to bribery; accepting an emolument introduces an improper element — personal gain — into the decision-maker’s calculus, less obviously and overtly than in cases of actual bribery, but no less serious for that.

And that is precisely the situation Trump is now in. He has 49 additional applications pending before the Chinese Trademark Office. He has been given a nice, valuable gift, and he could be forgiven for thinking that other similar gifts could follow (if he behaves himself well).

It's worth repeating that this question could have easily been avoided had Trump bowed to the norms of the presidency and gone further to divest or partition his office from his business than he has. The only reason we're having this conversation is because our current President made the decision to make such questions relevant. And since Trump currently has the status both of President and businessman, benefits to the one must be considered benefits to the other. The granting of trademarks ought to be included in this, particularly given the circumstances surrounding how and when those trademarks went from being wholly rejected to suddenly being granted.

And for those who would point out that Trump is merely getting his legal benefits under Chinese law, that shouldn't matter.

But why should that matter for purposes of the foreign emoluments clause? If France had had a law that gave all visiting Americans a snuff box (if they came at a certain time to the Hotel de Ville and submitted an application), would Jefferson have been able to keep his? Wouldn’t it have been just as troublesome in those circumstances as an outright gift would have been?

Questions like this were bound to arise after we elected our first billionaire businessman-President. Those questions were assured to exist when that President refused to divest from his business. And we shouldn't look negatively upon our President's previous business success or acumen. But the emoluments clause does exist and, if it is to have any relevant meaning at all, it seems likely that these Chinese trademarks violate it. If nothing else, perhaps cases such as these will finally bring legal clarity to whether the clause applies to the President, because that's a question that is practically begging to be answered at this point.

from the pay-to-play-legislation dept

For years now, we've noted how state legislatures are so corrupt, they quite literally let giant ISPs like AT&T and Comcast write state telecom law. These laws, as you might expect, do everything in their power to keep the pricey, abysmal customer service broadband status quo in place by hamstringing any and every attempt to bring competition to bear on these complacent duopolists. That's particularly true of the anti-community broadband bills passed in more than 20 states that prevent towns and cities from upgrading their own local telecom infrastructure -- even in instances where incumbent providers refuse to.

This kind of protectionism is precisely what's going on right now in Virginia, where incumbent broadband providers have convinced (read: thrown a lot of money at) state Delegate Kathy Byron to propose HB 2108, aka the "Virginia Broadband Deployment Act." The act does nothing to improve broadband deployment; in fact it does the exact opposite, preventing ad-hoc community broadband solutions in light of market failure. It also saddles towns and cities with all manner of restrictions, forcing them to get approval by committees stocked with incumbent ISP lobbyists if they want to even strike public/private broadband partnerships.

Byron has been under notable fire the last few weeks by folks who believe, crazily, that perhaps you shouldn't let giant ISPs with decades of documented anti-competitive behavior write state telecom policy. While Byron has tried to claim that hamstringing towns and cities will somehow improve broadband expansion and pricing, other locals have been busy calling a spade a spade:

Opponents argue that the bill would discourage competition that would drive down broadband costs for poor Virginians and that it would hamper existing municipal broadband networks from providing a necessary service.

The Roanoke City Council unanimously condemned HB 2108 on Tuesday, claiming it would endanger a $9.6 million investment by the city and other local governments in the Roanoke Valley Broadband Authority.

“I’ll call it what it is – an effort by the legacy carriers to protect their turf,” Councilman Ray Ferris said, according to the Roanoke Times. “It’s crony capitalism at its finest.”

"If enacted, HB 2108 would not only hurt Virginia’s localities and their residents, but it would also harm the private sector in multiple ways. Among other things, it would derail or unnecessarily complicate and delay public-private partnerships. It would interfere with the ability of private companies to make timely sales of equipment and services to public broadband providers. It would deny private companies timely access to advanced networks over which they could offer business and residential customers an endless array of modern products and services. It would also impair economic and educational opportunities that contribute to a skilled workforce from which businesses across the state will benefit.

The letter also proceeds to crazily suggest that maybe, just maybe, decisions on local infrastructure should be left up to the voters, not the CEOs of Comcast, CenturyLink, or AT&T:

Communities in Virginia are eager to work with willing established carriers, enter into public-private partnerships with new entrants, develop their own networks, if necessary, or create other innovative means of acquiring affordable access to advanced communications capabilities. These are fundamentally local decisions that should be made by the communities themselves, through the processes that their duly elected and accountable local officials ordinarily use for making comparable decisions. They should also be able to use their own resources as they deem appropriate to foster economic development, educational opportunity, public safety, and much more, without having to comply with the bottlenecks that HB 2108 would impose.

As we've noted repeatedly, ISPs have been extremely successful the last fifteen years in passing these kinds of laws by framing this as a partisan debate, intentionally sowing division. But getting better broadband and improved competition has broad, bipartisan support. As does letting local communities decide for themselves what to do about the local infrastructure impact of obvious private sector failure. And these bills don't solve any problems; in fact they make fixing the problem of spotty broadband coverage significantly harder.

Most consumers realize this, which is why, like so many tech policy issues incorrectly framed as partisan (net neutrality), these ad-hoc local solutions often see broad, bipartisan support among actual consumers.

from the with-great-power-comes-great-corruption dept

Back in 2015, Techdirt wrote about a government project in China that involves "citizen scores," a rating system that will serve as a measure of a person's political compliance. The authorities aim to do that by drawing on the huge range of personal data that we all generate in our daily use of the Internet. The data would be scooped up from various public and private services and fed into an algorithm to produce an overall citizen score that could be used to reward the obedient and punish the obstreperous. Naively, we might suppose that only authoritarian governments could ever obtain all that highly-revealing information, but an article from supchina.com reveals that is far from the case. It discusses some great journalism from Guangzhou's Southern Metropolis Daily, whose reporters documented their success in buying every kind of personal data about colleagues from "tracking" services advertised online:

For a modest fee of 700 yuan, or about 100 dollars, the reporters were able to obtain an astonishing array of information based on one colleague's personal ID number, including a full history of hotel rooms checked into, airline flights taken, internet cafes visited, border entries and exits, apartment rentals, real estate holdings -- even deposit records from the country's four major banks.

But that wasn't all. The reporters were also able to purchase live location data on another colleague's mobile phone, pinpointing their position with disturbing accuracy.

The article points out the inevitable conclusion from this journalistic investigation: officials within the government who have ready access to this personal information are happy to sell it to anyone for low prices, no questions asked. It's possible some of the databases have been hacked by outsiders, but it seems unlikely that online break-ins could make enough of them accessible, enough of the time. Corrupt officials with continuous access would be a more reliable source for these tracking services, of which there are hundreds. Supchina.com concludes:

We often imagine China as having the kind of centralized authoritarian system that might be capable of implementing a watertight and monolithic system of digital social controls. And certainly, in the digital age, there is merit in the idea that an expansive hold on big data may possess the key to political power. But as data becomes ever more precious, securing this resource could become virtually impossible -- particularly in a system like China's, which lacks adequate legal and political protections.

That's an important point that's often overlooked. As well as the immense power that mass surveillance confers on the authorities, it also creates a wonderful resource for corrupt officials to access and sell. It would be naive in the extreme to think that this is only a problem for China, and that it won't happen with the ever-widening surveillance systems that Western nations want to set up. It's yet another reason not to build them in the first place.

from the no-lobbyists-left-behind dept

Update: So... literally a minute before this post was about to go live came the news that House Republicans have magically dropped this plan, after it received a ton of negative press overnight, and had tons of inbound phone calls and, yes, even our President Elect sort of (but not really) came out against the plan. While the Bloomberg article above credits Trump for this, if you read what he actually said, he does call the Office of Congressional Ethics "unfair," he just says this isn't a priority now (perhaps meaning the following plan will come back in the future). Since this is still a possibility, here's the original post.

The OCE was created in 2008 in response to the Jack Abramoff scandal, and some other Congressional corruption scandals, that resulted in three members of Congress going to jail. The OCE was an independent office that was set up to investigate Congressional ethics and corruption violations. Not surprisingly, not everyone in Congress was thrilled about having an independent office investigating them, so Goodlatte seems to have made sure that won't be a problem -- and he did so without any warning, without any debate and even against the wishes of the leadership of his own party:

The move to effectively kill the Office of Congressional Ethics was not made public until late Monday, when Representative Robert W. Goodlatte, Republican of Virginia and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, announced that the House Republican Conference had approved the change. There was no advance notice or debate on the measure.

The surprising vote came on the eve of the start of a new session of Congress, where emboldened Republicans are ready to push an ambitious agenda on everything from health care to infrastructure, issues that will be the subject of intense lobbying from corporate interests. The House Republicans’ move would take away both power and independence from an investigative body, and give lawmakers more control over internal inquiries.

It also came on the eve of a historic shift in power in Washington, where Republicans control both houses of Congress and where a wealthy businessman with myriad potential conflicts of interest is preparing to move into the White House.
Continue reading the main story

Speaker Paul D. Ryan and Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the majority leader, spoke out during the meeting to oppose the measure, aides said on Monday night.

Goodlatte, has put out a somewhat ridiculous statement defending the move, claiming (incorrectly) that this strengthens OCE's mission. Of course, then he also notes that it "improves upon the due process rights" of members of Congress. But experts note that all it's really doing is letting Congress take control over the previously independent organization, and giving Congress the power to kill investigations. I guess that's one way to "improve due process rights." But, really, was there really a problem with the "due process rights" of members of Congress being investigated for corruption and ethics violations?

In fact, Buzzfeed does a nice job showing all of the ways in which this does the exact opposite of what Goodlatte claims concerning "strengthening" OCE's mission:

The OCE should no longer be independent. Insteads, it will be under the House's Committee on Ethics, which is run by members of Congress.

The office will no longer be able to accept anonymous tips from whistleblowers.

The ethics office must stop any investigation if the House ethics committee tells them to.

The ethics office cannot investigate any tips of misconduct that took place before Jan. 3, 2011

The office can no longer talk about its findings -- even hire a spokesperson.

OCE cannot investigate any criminal cases or turn allegations of corruption over to law enforcement.

That, uh, does not sound at all like "strengthening" OCE's mission. It sounds like the exact opposite. In other news, Rep. Goodlatte's statement over this is a blatant lie.

Politico has some details of how some members who had been investigated by the OCE supported gutting it, claiming that they felt unfairly targeted -- even though all of the examples given resulted in OCE deciding there were no ethics violations. It's entirely possible that OCE may have been annoying for Congress to deal with, but no one seems to have presented any evidence that it ever came to conclusions that were incorrect or unfair -- just that their investigations were annoying. And... so what? Congress should be under a microscope when it comes to ethics and corruption. The whole idea that Congress itself can just unilaterally undermine its own oversight is pretty ridiculous -- especially at a time when so few trust Congress, and so many believe it to be so corrupt.

from the business-threats dept

We've already made it clear that we're quite concerned about how freedom of expression will fare under President Trump. He has a long history of threatening and/or suing those who cover him factually, but in a manner he dislikes. And while he hasn't (as far as I can tell) threatened to sue anyone since the election, he appears to have become somewhat obsessed with the NY Times. Since winning the election he's tweeted at least six times about the NY Times, insisting (incorrectly) that it was losing subscribers and (incorrectly) that it had "apologized" to readers for its Trump coverage. He also claimed (incorrectly) that it had said he hadn't spoken to foreign leaders -- when the actual article just said that his conversations with foreign leaders happened without State Department briefings (which is fairly stunning). Here's what the NY Times said:

One week after Mr. Trump scored an upset victory that took him by surprise, his team was improvising the most basic traditions of assuming power. That included working without official State Department briefing materials in his first conversations with foreign leaders.

But Trump claimed something entirely different:

And, yes, I know that there are some folks who just flat out hate the NY Times and think that it lies and such. And I've certainly complained my fair share about weak or misleading coverage by the NY Times over the years, but it's still problematic when a President or President-elect is directly attacking any publication. It creates serious chilling effects on reporters. And, it can be even worse than that. As Yashar Ali noted in a Twitter thread, attacking a company as "failing" has real consequences, especially one that is traded on the public markets, potentially harming all sorts of everyday investors.

I'm guessing that many who just hate the NY Times won't care about this, but it is serious. There's a reason why Presidents don't go around attacking companies or saying that they're "failing" or that their business is in trouble. Because that has real consequences. I still don't think that journalists should be suing Trump for defamation, as some have suggested, but it would be nice if our President-elect recognized that going around and attacking the press -- even if he disagrees with its coverage -- is entirely inappropriate.